Having everybody play “O Holy Night” together after Christmas dinner was a perfectly good idea. We just didn’t start practicing soon enough. We were all busy — you know.

Christmas Eve, Lee, my kid in Columbia, called for help tuning her guitar. She has a pitch pipe but couldn’t blow it and strum the note at the same time. She needed a low E.

I played it for her on the piano, but she couldn’t hear it, so I had to sing it. I kept hitting the key and singing while she tuned. I couldn’t tell, over the phone, whether she got it or not.

She called back twice more, once to play some chords for me and once to get me to clap the time. I’m embarrassingly bad at keeping time. “Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day,” she said.

My other kid called too, to play the notes she’d managed on the flute, but she kept running out of breath. Needed practice.

Her daughter, Janell, who is playing the clarinet in band, had the wind for the song, but she hates reading music and was waiting for someone to play the melody for her, or sing it, so she could figure out the song by ear. Still, she looked real professional walking around the house sucking a reed to soften it up.

We decided her brother, Ben, should strum the autoharp, an instrument with chords marked on white buttons. When you press the button and strum, the autoharp plays the chord. It was way out of tune because nobody had played it in at least two years. Tuning it took me two hours. That’s two hours I should have spent practicing the piano.

After Christmas dinner, we explored our musical situation. The first thing we discovered is that the flute and the clarinet use different musical notation, so playing from my sheet music didn’t work.

The autoharp went out of tune again.

Instead of being an ensemble, we started to pair off, guitar with flute, keyboard with clarinet, looking for a mix that would work. At the same time, my girls got into an argument about how tall they really are, which led my son-in-law to get out a carpenter’s measure, a ploy, I think, to stop everybody from playing instruments at the same time, but not together.

He measured me — five-three. Unlike the girls, who came up short, I am exactly what I said I was. Haven’t shrunk a bit since I reached my full height at age 13. Janell is 13 now, so we decided to see how she measures up, since this is probably as tall as she will get. The tape said she also is five-three, but she clearly stands shorter than I.

This confusion never got straightened out, because Janell and Lee started playing a keyboard-guitar duet that actually sounded pretty good, and we sang along until the dogs started to howl. Those wiener dogs have super-sensitive ears.

I was going to suggest trying “Little Drummer Boy” next, on the theory that those bum-bum-bums would be easier for everybody than the rolling chords in “Holy Night,” but everybody suddenly needed a nap and that was the end of the music.

As I said, next year we’ll start practicing sooner.